The past decade has been marked by a technological revolution driven by the convergence of the data processing industry with the consumer electronics industry. The effect has, in turn, driven technologies that have been known and available but relatively quiescent over the years. A major one of these technologies is the Internet or Web related distribution of documents. The Web or Internet, which had quietly existed for over a generation as a loose academic and government data distribution facility, reached “critical mass” and commenced a period of phenomenal expansion. With this expansion, businesses and consumers have direct access to all matter of documents and media through the Web.
Also, because of this extensive access of businesses and consumers to the Internet or Web (used interchangeably herein), it is highly likely that anyone who might be asked to participate in a telephone conference would also have access to the Web. Such demographics has led the industry to seek applications in which the Web could be used in telephone conferencing. The present invention considers one such potential application.
The use of telephone conferencing in commerce and industry has undergone some changes that were not anticipated a decade ago. At that time, the trend appeared to be toward teleconferencing between sets of high technology studios each with groups of people and closed circuit television therebetween. While some of these set ups are still quite active, the business world appears to have moved back to a more basic and less expensive telephone conferencing in which individuals and remote telephone stations, each with either single attendees or conferees or groups of people over speaker phones participate in the telephone conference. This rather basic telephone conferencing has been proliferating world-wide driven by the economic and terrorist fear curtailment of travel.
While this form of telephone conferencing has been used quite effectively to save time and money, participants, i.e. conference attendees, have encountered some problems. First, during the initiation of the telephone conference, time is wasted as the participants connect on one by one until the quorum of requisite attendees is connected. Then, when several people are talking over the lines during the same time period, it is hard for each attendee to know who is who. Likewise, it is hard for the conference host or any other interested party to know when a required attendee has disconnected.